briantw

QB Lamar Jackson
QB Matt Stafford
RB Saquon Barkley
RB Breece Hall
RB Antonio Gibson
WR Ja'Marr Chase
WR Garrett Wilson
WR Treylon Burks
WR Van Jefferson
TE Mark Andrews
TE Jake Ferguson
K Justin Tucker
DEF Miami
DEF Seattle

BN Desmond Ridder
BN Tyler Allgeier
BN Zach Charbonnet
BN Sam LaPorta
BN Jonathan Mingo
BN Jayden Reed
BN Marvin Mims
BN Kareem Hunt
BN Isaiah Likely
BN Jacksonville

I'm happy with that team.  I've got three top 10-12 picks in Barkley, Chase, and Wilson, plus Mark Andrews, who is generally picked around the 2/3 turn.  Hall would have been a top ten guy too had he not torn his ACL last year.  Going to need at least one of my rookie WRs to hit, though, because I'm pretty thin at the position after Chase and Wilson on paper.  Although having those two guys will make up for some lackluster production from the other two spots.  I'm pretty high on Mims (especially with Jeudy likely to miss several weeks) and Reed, and I wouldn't be shocked if Mingo is the top receiver on the Panthers this year simply due to lack of competition.

I normally take a more conservative approach to auctions, but I threw that out the window this year and I think my two auction teams have been better for it. 

Thursday is fine.

Watched Renfield earlier tonight and thought it was great.  Solid 8 out of 10 movie.  Cage was absolutely fantastic, and Hoult and Awkwafina were good as well.  Feels like it could have been a bit longer.  The movie was an hour and a half and the crime family subplot was a little half-baked.  I love Shohreh Aghdashloo, but her character was under-utilized and ultimately kind of pointless.  If you're bringing in someone like her, give her more to do.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed Renfield.  It's a perfect movie to watch after smoking a bowl, which was exactly what I was in the mood for tonight.  It's dumb fun, but really well made.

6 minutes ago, grozeng said:

End of the draft and people were saving dollars for someone in particular.  Looks like I got Brian Robinson for $6 and Bronn got Isaiah Spiller for $7.  I know I was saving money for Robinson but also wanted Wilson.  Hindsight, I should have bid up Wilson.  It's like my $1 AJ Brown that I had for 4 years.

I'm pretty happy with Chase/Wilson/Dotson for a combined 22 bucks.  I think Elijah Moore could have a bounce back season too.  Cleveland seems to want to utilize him a ton. 

22 minutes ago, grozeng said:

briantw/Winterfell @briantw

Dollars Spent: 104

Penalty: 3 ( 3- 1 years, 1 - 2 years)

Available Budget: 96

Roster Spots Remaining: 8

Kyle Pitts - 16 (3 years)
Zach Wilson - 12 (2 years)
Ja'Marr Chase - 12 (2 years)
Cam Akers - 9 (1 years)
Kenneth Walker III - 9 (3 years)
D'Andre Swift - 9 (1 years)
Jahan Dotson - 7 (3 years)
Treylon Burks - 5 (3 years)
Diontae Johnson - 5 (1 years)
Antonio Gibson - 5 (2 years)
Elijah Moore - 4 (2 years)
Davis Mills - 4 (2 years)
Garrett Wilson - 3 (3 years)
Wan'Dale Robinson - 1 (3 years)
 

Dropped Players:

Joshua Kelley - 2 (1 years)
Terrance Marshall - 1 (2 years)

Cut:

Zach Wilson
Davis Mills
D'Andre Swift

Also, holy shit that Garrett Wilson contract is fucking rad.  How the fuck did Dotson go for four bucks more than Wilson? 

4 hours ago, grozeng said:

Briantw @briantw

1 - Travis Kelce, Jalen Hurts
2 - Breece Hall, Josh Allen
3 - Josh Jacobs
4- DK Metcalf
5 - Brandon Aiyuk
6 - Mac Jones, Brett Maher, Latavius Murray, Jacksonville
7 - Drake London Travis Etienne Jr
8 - Chris Olave
9 - Keneth Walker III
10 - Elijah Moore
11- Zach Wilson
12 - Rachaad White
14 - Wan'Dale Robinson
15 - Jahan Dotson
18 - Philadelphia, Parris Campbell

Hurts
Allen
Etienne
Olave
Walker
Moore
White
Dotson
Philly

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Cook's combined carries in college and the NFL: 1,969

Taylor's combined carries in college and the NFL: 1,682

He's four years younger, but he's been heavily overused. Henry fell in the draft in part because teams thought he had too many carries at Bama and Taylor had over 300 more at Wisconsin in the same amount of time. 

And this concerns turned out to be meaningless for Henry, who has had over 1700 carries in the NFL alone and has been a productive workhorse for the past five seasons, including last year in his age 28 season.  

We’ve seen time and time again that the really elite RBs don’t fall off a cliff the way less talented backs do, and Taylor is only 24.  There’s no chance he doesn’t have at least two more productive seasons in him, and probably closer to five. 

15 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Pretty much none of the Taylor to Miami noise made any sense.  Miami wasn't going to send assets to pay an injured Taylor more than they offered to free agent Dalvin Cook.

Taylor is four years younger than Cook and has a lot less miles on him.  He deserves a significantly larger contract than Cook at this point in their respective careers.  He should be getting what Cook got during his first extension. 

Don't forget, the Colts are also a shitshow. 

18 hours ago, Arakasi said:

My deck is being crushed in act 1 so I shudder to think how it will act in the city.

That shit's gonna melt like that Nazi dude who opened the Ark of the Covenant. 

That day/time should work for me.

On 8/10/2023 at 11:43 PM, Corvinus85 said:

I stumbled upon a bugbear fucking a female ogre. They didn't let my party leave without a fight. This game is something else.

I did the same but didn't have to fight.  My character (a Barbarian with the Dark Urge) made fun of the bugbear for being tiny and pathetic and he stumbled away in shame.

Tentative keepers:

Jalen Hurts - 1
Josh Allen - 2
Travis Etienne - 6
Drake London - 7
Chris Olave - 8
Kenneth Walker - 9
Elijah Moore - 10
Rachaad White - 12
Jahan Dotson - 15
Philadelphia D/ST - 18

Now I remember why I won last year.  That team also had Kelce, Jacobs, Metcalf, Aiyuk, Breece Hall, and Mac Jones.  

47 minutes ago, Whiskeyjack said:

Monday August 28
Tuesday August 29
Wednesday August 30
Thursday August 31 (after 8 central)
Friday September 1
Sunday September 3
Monday September 4
Tuesday September 5
Wednesday September 6 (after 8 central)

Need to hear from Jaxom, Mudguard, Race, Dunk, Ross, and Brian.

Any of those are fine for me.  Got no vacations planned for the next month. 

Gotta defend the crown.  In. 

In. 

I read Hunter S Thompson's Hell's Angels over the weekend.  It was an interesting look at a period in history that I wasn't alive for.  I was honestly shocked that the book was from the sixties.  I had no idea that motorcycle outlaws were a thing that early on.  I'd always assumed it was a 70s and 80s thing and not a lifestyle that sprung out of the aftermath of World War II.  

I'd only ever read Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas prior, but this book has certainly inspired me to track down some of his other writing in the near future.  Hell's Angels doesn't really have much in the way of a narrative, but Thompson's writing style is consistently entertaining and engaging.  It made it easy to knock the book out in three days, especially since it was hot as fuck all weekend and I was all too happy to spend some time inside with the AC cranked to 68 or 69.  

I also finished the audiobook for Stephen King's The Dead Zone, which was narrated by James Franco.  Franco's narration was somewhat inconsistent.  There are times when he's great and a few characters that he really excels with, but he'll also seem to zone out during long, slower sections and drone on unenthusiastically.  A bit more good than bad on the whole, though, and the book, which I read back in high school but didn't really remember, is a solid selection from King's massive library.  It's also one of the rare King novels that more or less sticks the landing.  

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

It's a goddamn masterpiece in world building. There's so much of everything in that book. Including the ability to burn a few calories by just trying to pick the damn thing up!  

Well, I got the Kindle version, so it’s the same weight as any other book. 

22 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

God yes. Even though I am constantly irked that Williams has made it his goal in life to shatter my wrists, I cannot deny the quality of his prose. 

I’m starting The Stone of Farewell tonight.  

1 hour ago, williamjm said:

I think Williams is the significantly better writer out of the two, even if he does have a tendency to be long-winded.

I finished The Dragonbone Chair for the first time recently and I agree that Williams is a superior author, and it’s also doubly interesting because you can see the huge influence he had on GRRM.  

39 minutes ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

They did feel like highschool (maybe even middle school) relationships. I'm definitely cool with, as a general matter, young adult characters who haven't been sexually active or experienced ...though the world building would need to justify it somehow.

It's an interesting thing to consider.

I thought Abercrombie handled YA relationships significantly better in his Shattered Sea books.  

Then again, he's pretty good at writing realistic sex scenes.  I thought all the scenes in his First Law series were pretty spot.  There weren't a ton, but they were well-written and funny and really captured that mix of lust and awkwardness that real sex typically involves, especially between lovers who are unfamiliar with each other.

3 minutes ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

Something of a tangent:

If you read a fantasy novel that "hit" on all sorts of levels but completely ignored sex and love and those sorts of relationships, how much would that detract from the overall feel of the world.

It depends on the story.  The Lies of Locke Lamora has no real sex scenes that I recall and the love story with Locke and whatever her name was is largely just hinted at in flashbacks and not elaborated on until later books.  It’s still a wonderful novel. 

The issue with Sanderson is that his books almost always feature relationships that are very childish, like awkard high school relationships rather than those of consenting adults.  And the characters all act like they’ve never fucked before, even the ones with kids.  

16 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Are there fans of Mistborn here? I’m trying to get through the first book and it feels so, I don’t know how to explain it, corny. 

I enjoyed the original Mistborn trilogy for the cool magic system, the fight scenes, and the crazy twists, but in general Sanderson isn’t a great writer and he absolutely sucks at writing relationships.  It feels like no one in his books fucks.

I also originally read it prior to burning through a lot of the other contemporary authors in the genre like Abercrombie, Abraham, Hobb, Lynch, and Bakker, so I didn’t have much to compare it to outside of Martin.

On 7/7/2023 at 6:01 PM, williamjm said:

I read James S.A. Corey's Memory's Legion, the collection of short stories in the Expanse Universe. I had previously only read The Butcher of Anderson Station out of them, and in retrospect I think it would have been good to read some of these while reading the main series because some of them do have important backstory for some of the characters. I thought The Churn, Auberon, The Vital Abyss and Strange Dogs were the best of them, and I think there's a good variety among those stories and they do bring some new perspectives on the setting.

I just finished that yesterday after doing a re-read of the entire series.  I hadn't read The Sins of Our Fathers or Auberon prior, so it was a nice surprise to see a couple of familiar faces in those.  Auberon was my personal favorite.  That character arc felt like it was written by Joe Abercrombie. 

On the whole, it's a really well done set of short stories / novellas.  I don't think there's a single clunker in the bunch.  Gods of Risk is the only one I think was forgettable, probably because the show fleshed that one out so much more.

On 7/8/2023 at 1:38 AM, Nictarion said:

I’m obviously biased, but these are hard to beat for me.

And as Maith said, their primary orange and black helmets are the best in the league. 

Eagles and Saints are up there, too. 

Fuck the Bengals and all, but those white unis are fire.